by Frank McLynn
Though deadly enemies, Diaz and Madero shared a mortal terror of the `anarchy of the masses' and were particularly apprehensive about Zapata, the so-called `Attila of the South', whose bloody triumph at Cuautla seemed like the harbinger of a new `War of the Castes', in which the Morelos leader would unite the Maya of Yucatan and the Indians of central Mexico in a campaign of genocide against the white man. From the elite point of view, Madero's challenge to Diaz had been reckless - which was why most of Madero's family were lukewarm about his enterprise. Men like Bernardo Reyes had backed off rather than push Diaz to the limit, because they had thought through the consequences. Once Mexicans saw the fallacy of `there is no alternative to don Porfirio', aspirations would be aroused that could not be contained, and the end of the road might be a convulsive social revolution. If you did not have to put up with Diaz, you did not have to put up with the hacendados either. Madero never grasped that he was merely the Mirabeau in an unstoppable process, and that after him would have to come the Robespierres, the men of Thermidor and the Bonapartes.
Almost all other revolutionary leaders opposed the deal he made with Diaz in the treaty of Ciudad Juarez. They, rightly, saw no need for such generous accommodation, since Madero had the whip hand. By this time it was not just the countryside but also cities like Durango, Chilpancingo and Cuernavaca that were in rebel hands. Even Carranza, no firebrand, warned Madero that he was `delivering to the reactionaries a dead revolution which will have to be fought over again'. Villa, violently opposed to the Ciudad Juarez treaty, prophesied (or so he later said) that Madero would end up assassinated and pleaded with him to let the Revolution continue until he had strung up all Establishment politicians from the highest tree. He was particularly disillusioned that Madero was not going to purge the Army and that nothing was said about retribution against Creel and the Terrazas. When Madero brushed his misgivings aside, Villa offered his resignation.
Madero was happy to accept it, but offered Villa 25,000 pesos in severance pay. When Villa protested indignantly (and truthfully) that he had not fought for money, Madero insisted that he take io,ooo pesos as a personal favour to him. What Villa really wanted was a grand title that would recognise his heroic role in the struggle, but the macho code of honour and respect left Villa no choice but to agree to the money gift; he promised himself he would now buy the elusive butcher's shop and settle down - but first he had a private score to settle. Giuseppe Garibaldi had been boasting that he and a handful of American volunteers had really taken Ciudad Juarez on their own. Apoplectic with rage, Villa tracked Garibaldi down to the Hotel Sheldon in El Paso, where he found him in company with three US Secret Service men. It transpired that Washington had heard of Villa's threats against Garibaldi and had taken steps to prevent an international incident. Gustavo Madero, who was with Villa, tried to get him out of the hotel without incident, but Villa uttered vociferous threats. The mayor of El Paso ordered Villa out of his bailiwick, and he suffered the humiliation of being run out of town by the Secret Servicemen, who deposited him on the middle of the international bridge and warned him not to come back.
The first stage of the Mexican Revolution was now complete. Militarily, some ominous lessons had been learned, principally that wellgarrisoned cities were not invulnerable to attack. Trains, aircraft, the wireless and even barbed wire had not yet made the impact they would later - though the theory of barbed wire in warfare was well understood, after its employment by the Italians when occupying Eritrea in 1885 and, especially, by the British in the Boer War, who used it to link forts in their blockhouse system - but above all the 1gjo-11 period showed the deadly efficacy of dynamite and machine-guns; perhaps the proximity of the USA was relevant, for the four most important figures in the history of the machine-gun - Richard Gatling, John Moses Browning, Hiram Maxim and Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis - were all Americans.
The basis of the machine-gun was a series of parallel barrels, six in some models, ten in others, which were revolved round a fixed axis by a crank, and usually fed automatically from a drum mounted above the barrels; early models fired up to ioo rounds a minute, later ones up to 1,ooo. The Gatling gun was first used significantly in battle at Tel-el- Kebir in 1882, when six Gatlings manned by thirty British sailors were said to have accounted for half Arabi Pasha's 12,ooo Egyptian dead. However, the Gatling was not a self-firing gun of the type that continued to fire as long as the trigger was pressed. It was Hiram Maxim who introduced a method of gelatinising nitrocellulose, which allowed the burning speed of powder to be accurately controlled. Maxim worked out a method enabling him to use the recoil automatically to eject the first round, pull another round into position, then fire the second round. The recoil from this second round repeated the cycle, which continued as long as the trigger was pressed, the rate of fire being adjustable up to 6oo rounds a minute.
Browning used the energy of escaping muzzle gases to operate his weapon, then developed the improved recoil-operated mechanism. Lewis had a gas-operated gun, charged from a flat drum magazine and this became the preferred method of combat in the aerial dogfights of the First World War. Machine-guns had featured prominently in the terrible trench-warfare battles of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 - although they were not mass produced until the First World War - and were thus a treasured item in the armoury of the opposing forces in the Mexican Revolution.
Their impact could well have been decisive but for the `equalising' weapon of the dynamite bomb, the favourite device of guerrilla revolutionaries. Although Hollywood movies anachronistically show dynamite in use in Juarez's wars with the French, the development of this unique high explosive was a feature of the late 186os. One of the amazing stories in the history of technology was the discovery that, by adding nitric acid, cotton-wool could become explosive gun-cotton, and that an emollient cosmetic liquid, glycerine, could become nitroglycerine, a heavy, oily-looking liquid which explodes with tremendous violence. It is more destructive than gun-cotton, and can be exploded by a fuse containing fulminating powder, fired from a distance by electricity. Ten times as powerful as gunpowder (gun-cotton six times), it became the favourite blasting agent for miners. It was first used in liquid form as `blasting oil', but because of the dangers of handling it, it was later mixed with a powdered substance (itself without action and merely a vehicle for containing the nitroglycerine), and this became known as dynamite. The art of detonation became more nuanced: if one wanted to blast an object to smithereens, one used `high explosive' or dynamite; if one wanted to blast, say, large granite blocks to make building stone, or a coal seam to yield lumps of coal, one used `low explosive' or gunpowder.
There were many nineteenth-century developments in dynamite, notably the use of chlorate of potassium instead of nitrate as the oxygensupplying material. The great name in the history of dynamite is Alfred Nobel. Although Sobrero had discovered nitroglycerine in laboratory experiments, several grave accidents in the late i86os seemed to put a question mark against `blasting oil'. Nitroglycerine was perceived to be so dangerous that Britain prohibited its import in a liquid state; it had to be pre-processed into dynamite. The breakthrough came when Nobel discovered a detonation method, enabling nitroglycerine to be absorbed by an inert porous material, a silicaceous earth of which one part would absorb three times its weight in nitroglycerine. Later, other substances were used for absorbing the liquid, and in the end there were two types of dynamite: one with inert absorbents and the other with absorbents that were themselves combustible or explosive, such as charcoal, nitrate, chlorate and even gunpowder, gun-cotton and nitro-mixtures. But the first significant use of dynamite in bomb form was in the Mexican Revolution.
If the impact of military technology on the Revolution was palpable, the social significance of the Revolution was less clear-cut. In retrospect it is easy to see Villa and Zapata as the two most important figures. Zapata represented the agrarian peasantry - the villagers, sharecroppers and smallholders who suffered from the greed of hacendado, ranchero or cacique
and who wanted their stolen lands back. Agrarian grievances were overwhelmingly the biggest issue in the Revolution, hardly surprisingly, given that four-fifths of the population lived in the countryside. For every 1,000 peasants, there were 12o artisans, ioo small farmers, forty factory workers, thirty miners, ten ranchers and two hacendados.
Zapata's achievement was to give a concrete form to peasant aspirations that had remained dormant and even partly unconscious. This was why his fame had already transcended state boundaries. It was his inspiration that enabled peasant revolutionaries in Oaxaca and Veracruz to break free of the grip of the hacendados. In Sinaloa rebels `legitimated' their rebellion by reference to Zapata's ideas and went into battle crying `Viva Zapata' - an eloquent testimony to a man they had never clapped eyes on. The local Sinaloa warlords, Manuel Vegas and Juan Banderas, yielded to no one in their admiration for Zapata. Even in distant Chiapas, during a quickly suppressed local revolt, the Indians who fought the rurales used `Viva Zapata' as their warcry. Zapata was the man the oligarchs most hated and feared - a hatred fuelled by the realisation that they were opposed by an intelligent revolutionary who had built up an ongoing movement, which would not collapse overnight like the traditional peasant jacqueries. Those who felt confident they could co-opt Madero liked to contrast the `respectable' revolution conducted by Madero in the north with the `brigandage' of Zapatismo in the south.
Zapatismo necessarily implied class-conflict, but the centaurs of the north, like Orozco and Villa, headed more fluid movements, opposed to Diaz because of unemployment, economic hardship, taxation, the ley fuga, conscription and press-gangs. Because they fought for local independence against the centralising tendencies of Mexico City, these rebels could transcend class issues, to the point where some sceptics have referred to them as `non-revolutionary rebels'. One could argue that Villa and Orozco fought, not like Zapata for the issue of land itself, but merely against the particular way it had been divided up by a contingent corrupt clique in the form of Creel and the Terrazas. In the north it was possible for Madero to recruit ex-villistas and Orozco men as rurales; for obvious reasons, this would have been unthinkable in Morelos.
The groups headed by Zapata and Villa were the cutting edge of the Revolution, but there were other social elements that played a subsidiary role. Although the urban masses played little part in the events of 1910-I I, the fear that they might was ever-present in Diaz's mind. Alan Knight has established that, in so far as urban rebels did play a part, the driving force was provided by artisans, a disaffected group under the last years of the Porfiriato, as they had lost out to large-scale factory production. In the 1910 census there were 67,000 carpenters, 44,000 shoemakers, 23,000 hat-weavers, 23,000 potters and 18,ooo hatters. These artisans were in the vanguard of the city riots that played an important part in the demoralisation of the propertied classes, and helped to erode the traditional principles of hierarchy and deference. As soon as news of the treaty of Ciudad Juarez came in, towns like Celaya, Leon and San Miguel de Allende were torn by rioting. Prisons were flung open, shops looted, archives and government records destroyed. In general, the older industrial and administrative towns of central Mexico, where the economy was declining and the workers impoverished, were worst hit by rioting. When maderistas intervened on the side of the propertied classes and suppressed the riots with vigour, they lost further caste with the workers, appearing simply as old porfirista wine in new bottles.
Durango was another state to suffer after the treaty of Ciudad Juarez. Durango City itself, which had been strongly defended by the federals, surrendered peacefully and the handover was smooth, but in Torreon there was widespread looting of the property of Chinese immigrants and 250 Chinese were killed in a vicious pogrom, which featured beheadings, disembowellings, death at the horse's tail and death while naked before drunken firing squads. It was always the Chinese and the Spanish, rarely the Americans, who were the targets for Mexican xenophobia. The Chinese had made the mistake of getting themselves tagged as `the Jews of Mexico' by going into moneylending, shopkeeping and pawnbroking; as `class enemies', they were considered fair game by the mob.
There was at one time a notion, plugged by the French Annales school of history, that mineworkers were a significant element in the Mexican Revolution. Certainly there were 90,000 miners, dispersed throughout Mexico, especially in the north, where Sonora was noted for its copper, Coahuila for its coal and Durango, Hidalgo and Chihuahua (with 4,000 different mines) for their silver. However, Mexican miners did not form the same kind of coherent group as British coalminers, say, in the same era. Most of them were transient Indians, temporary drifters, migrant villagers, opportunistic part-timers. Being a miner meant little in terms of social or political profile, and there was no question of the formation of a revolutionary core orfoco like that of the Bolivian tinminers in the 1950s. It is implausible that economic recession in the mines could have radicalised miners and provided a `watershed of rebellion', if only because the hard core of Mexican miners were highly paid and unrebellious; it was the transients, first to be laid off, who went to join Villa and Orozco in the sierras. The evidence suggests that the miners' only real loyalty was to the foreign owners who paid them well, and not to Diaz nor Madero nor Orozco.
The Mexican Revolution was not yet, and never would be, an allconsuming civil war. Certain social groups played no part at all in the early stages, notably the urban working classes, the resident peons on the great estates in central and northern Mexico and the debt-peonage unfortunates in the tropical south-east. This is hardly surprising, for the Mexican Revolution would never be a nationwide phenomenon. It was never a nation in arms for, even at the apogee in 1915, there were no more than ioo,ooo men under arms. Fighting was never widespread, but was confined largely to the northern and central areas, especially Chihuahua, Durango, Mexico State and Morelos. This geographical limitation was particularly noticeable in 1910-11. The states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Jalisco were largely quiescent, though these areas had been vociferous in their opposition to Diaz in 19o8-1o.
The most notable absentee state in 1910-II was Sonora. Perhaps the main reason was that the struggles of Madero, Villa and Zapata seemed irrelevant here. The anti-Diaz grievances of Sonorans focused on the state's elite with their snouts in the trough, and there was also the feeling that a quick transfer of power in Mexico City to head off more radical grievances was the consummation most devoutly to be wished. Only among the Yaqui Indians was there a profound moral and `organic' resentment comparable to that of the zapatistas in Morelos. The Yaquis, peaceful since 1908, broke out into rebellion again when Madero raised his standard, but purely for reasons of their own; they joined the maderistas on the basis that their lands would be restored and their exiled comrades returned from Yucatan and Quintana Roo. Madero reluctantly accepted the Yaquis as allies and by June 1911, there were I,ooo Yaqui warriors in the field. Yet Madero had no intention of acceding to Yaqui aspirations. Convinced, like Lampedusa's prince, that things had to change so that everything could remain the same, Madero was about to disappoint every group in Mexico with the exception of the one he had ostensibly overthrown.
MADERO AND ZAPATA
Diaz formally resigned on 25 May 1911 and boarded a train for Veracruz and thence for France (whose troops he had defeated at Puebla nearly fifty years earlier) - but not before his machine-gunners had enjoyed one final massacre of demonstrators in Mexico City's Zocalo on the 24th. Students and workers converged on the Zocalo that evening in a mood of triumphalism, but Diaz had stationed a dozen machine-guns on the roof of the National Palace and several companies of riflemen on the roof of the Cathedral, plus a regiment held in reserve on the south side of the square. Clearly he meant to go out of Mexican history as bloodily as he entered it. Between 9 and io p.m. a crowd of 75,000 jammed the Zocalo, and when police charges failed to disperse them, the troops opened up, first the riflemen on the Cathedral, then the machine-guns. The demonstrators seemed disinclined to cut
and run, even as their comrades fell around them in dozens. It was fortunate, therefore, that a violent squall of rain sent everyone scurrying for cover before a terrible massacre could occur. Even so, over 200 people lay dead and i,ooo were wounded.
After such brutality, it was a moot question whether Diaz would leave Mexico alive. General Victoriano Huerta took the old dictator down to Veracruz in convoy, with Diaz's train in the centre protected by two troop trains - a necessary precaution, as it turned out, since the convoy was attacked by rebels. At Veracruz Diaz spent five days as the guest of Lord Cowdray's company before boarding the German steamer Ypiranga on the 31st. As he embarked, he is alleged to have said: `Madero has unleashed a tiger; let us see if he can control him.' Sadly, like Diaz's `so far from God' remark, this quip must be assigned to the ranks of the apocrypha, but it did accurately sum up Madero's dilemma.
On 3 June Madero set out from Coahuila for a four-day 70o-mile triumphal progress to the capital. His frenzied reception at every station and halt made him appear not so much a liberator in the tradition of Bolivar, as a deliverer in the Messianic sense. People fought and jostled to touch the `promised one', as if he possessed the power of healing. Lionised, cheered and applauded with bells, vivas and fireworks all the way down from the border to Mexico City, when he arrived on 7 June to the ecstatic greeting of ioo,ooo people - one-fifth of the capital's population lined the route for his afternoon entry - Madero was essentially living in a fool's paradise.
At dawn on the day of his arrival Mexico City had been convulsed with one of the greatest earthquakes in national history. Lasting fifteen minutes, it destroyed hundreds of houses, the main railway station, the San Cosme army barracks, the church of Santo Domingo, and it paralysed gas and electricity supplies. Coinciding with Madero's arrival, the earthquake was interpreted variously, according to political belief, either as God's punishment of the people for ousting Diaz or as his warning that the man soon to arrive was the chosen one. The sober facts were that 207 people died. Already the Mexican Revolution was proving profligate with human life. Within a month, if we include the Chinese ethnically cleansed in Torreon, the demonstrators massacred in the Zocalo, and those killed by the earthquake, nearly i,ooo people who were nowhere near a battlefield had suffered violent deaths.